Experts Denounce US Human Rights Violation at Tehran Conference

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Several political analysts and university professors took the podium at a conference in Iran’s capital of Tehran to lay bare the true face of the US government and document how it has systematically violated human rights.

The University of Tehran hosted the international conference on “The United States, Human Rights and the Discourse of Domination” on July 2, attended by Iranian and foreign scholars and political experts.

During the conference, co-organized by the Iranian World Studies Association, Islamic Human Rights Commission in London, and the University of Tehran’s Faculty of World Studies, speakers enumerated the factors making the United States the world’s biggest violator of human rights.

In a speech, Saeid Reza Ameli, the president of the Faculty of World Studies, said, “The US has thousands of nuclear warheads but makes a fuss about one imaginary nuclear warhead while it already knows that Iran is not after nuclear weapons.”

Taking a swipe at Washington for the cultural and social violation of human rights, he added, “Nations want to live by their own culture. It would be a violation of their rights if one wants to impose its way of life on them.”

Another speaker, Foad Izadi, deplored the sanctions the US has imposed on Iran, saying, “Our country is accused of violating human rights. The US, in the name of human rights, is in violation of human rights. The latest sanctions by the United States are more expansive than the pre-JCPOA sanctions. Our country should defend itself against human rights related accusations. Public diplomacy in this affair should be followed more seriously. The enemies have formed a discourse against us and we need to do so and show a more active presence in the international arena.”

The next speaker, Daniel Kovalik, a professor of international human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, said, “The stark truth is that the US really has no intention of helping to build strong states in the Middle East or elsewhere. Rather, as we see time and again, the goal of US foreign policy is increasingly and more aggressively the destruction of independent states.”

Elsewhere in the conference, Beau Grosscup, California State University Professor Emeritus of Political Science, delivered an address dubbed ‘Dodging the Terrorism Label’, saying, “It means that the US is in a supreme position and it is the US that decides who are terrorists and who are liberalist fighters.”

“Avoiding the terrorism label is a plan. The final end game is a US imposed ‘investigative silence’ over a sufficient length of time during which focus shifts to other issues. In short, owning the word terror, does not just mean dominating the discourse, it also means owning the ‘silence,’ investigative process and time schedule,” he added, according to the University of Tehran’s website.

“The US declared war on terror after 9/11. The argument that one is terrorist and again a freedom fighter, from another perspective, is a flawed cliché because terrorism could be interpreted in different ways. The real meaning of terrorism today is where the US decides who are terrorists and who are freedom fighters. This is applied also in its public and private policy and discourse,” Grosscup explained.